After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.

At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.

“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.” With that, he set the course of a determined and methodical, if at times dysfunctional and maddeningly slow, investigation that would yield the indictment of Mr. Trump on four counts of election interference in August 2023.

In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court. In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.

In the aftermath of a landmark ruling that mandated former President Donald Trump to pay $355 million for fraudulently augmenting the values of his properties — a judgment that prohibits him from assuming the role of director in any New York-based company for three years — the Warren Buffett's insights during a series of lectures at Notre Dame in 1991 are uncannily accurate.

Buffett, whose reputation as a legendary investor and the guiding force behind Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is well-established, used the lectures to articulate a critical examination of Trump’s business methodologies, specifically targeting his penchant for leveraging debt.

His analysis, preserved on TilsonFunds.com, pointed to Trump’s overreliance on leverage as a fundamental flaw. “The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right,” Buffett said, adding that Trump’s strategy of heavily borrowing money to finance acquisitions was flawed from the start.

According to Buffett, Trump managed to secure loans for properties at prices well above their value, creating a significant disparity between his assets’ actual worth and the debt incurred to acquire them. “He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets and what he paid for them and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there,” Buffett said, highlighting the precarious financial foundation on which Trump built his empire.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-exposed-reason-trumps-174241835.html

Young people are becoming less happy than older generations as they suffer “the equivalent of a midlife crisis”, global research has revealed as America’s top doctor warned that “young people are really struggling”.

Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe. He said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane”.

… After 12 years in which people aged 15 to 24 were measured as being happier than older generations in the US, the trend appears to have flipped in 2017. The gap has also narrowed in western Europe and the same change could happen in the coming year or two, it is thought. Murthy described the report findings as a “red flag that young people are really struggling in the US and now increasingly around the world”. He said he was still waiting to see data that proved social media platforms were safe for children and adolescents, and called for international action to improve real-life social connections for young people.

… World Happiness Report, an annual barometer of wellbeing in 140 nations coordinated by Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre, Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, showed “disconcerting drops [in youth happiness] especially in North America and western Europe,” said Prof Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre and editor of the study. “To think that in some parts of the world children are already experiencing the equivalent of a midlife crisis, demands immediate policy action,” he said.

More at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/20/young-people-becoming-less-happy-than-older-generations-research-shows?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Former President Donald Trump is in a Florida courtroom where his attorneys are arguing for the dismissal of his federal classified documents case. Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges against Trump, is also in attendance.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon began the hearing without making any mention of the case's trial date and instead directed the defense lawyers to begin arguing their motion to dismiss based on unconditional vagueness. "These charges must be struck and dismissed," defense lawyer Emil Bove argued. Bove suggested that Trump is a victim of a double standard compared to other presidents who allegedly retained sensitive information, directly mentioning the conduct of Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Joe Biden.

Cannon responded to the defense argument with skepticism – at one point suggesting the defense motion was "premature" – and peppered Bove with questions about definitions and hypotheticals of Trump's conduct. "When does it become unauthorized?" Cannon asked.

"President Trump designated the records as personal when he took them out of the White House," Bove said.

"What is your definition of unauthorized?" Cannon later asked. "Judge – I don't have one, and that is why the statute is unconstitutionally vague applied to President Trump," Bove said.

More at https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-expected-attend-hearing-seek-dismissal-classified-documents/story?id=108092856